Plugin rendering a list of images as a photo carousel or as a photo grid

[vadimkantorov]

I'm looking of a plugin which will automatically render code like:

- ![image figcaption](https://path/to/file1.img)
- ![image figcaption](https://path/to/file2.img)

into a photo gallery / photo carousel HTML. The usecase would be adding this plugin to Astro, and rendering Photo Galleries in a blog post without introducing an Astro component and just interpreting standard Markdown syntax in a special custom way.

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Does there exist something like this already? If not, how does one go about implementing something like this?

Also, is this Discussions board alive? It seems that most of discussions were created several years ago. Same for Issues - there are very few issues raised in 2025. Is the remark project alive? Thanks!

[Murderlon]

If you want to do something as custom as this from within markdown you probably have to go for MDX, which Astro has first-class support for.

Is the remark project alive?

The unified ecosystem (which includes remark) is incredibly stable, it should be normalized more for software to come close to a state of done instead of expecting weekly commits to judge its health.

[vadimkantorov]

is incredibly stable,

This is a great stage for a project to achieve. I was refering mainly to absence of recent user questions / feature requests. Which made me wonder if there exists another user forum somewhere else (these days many projects have a special Discourse) and what is the appropriate place to ask for help in implementing a plugin or to post a plugin request...

I've vibe-coded a rehype plugin which should do the job. But for some reason, it is not applied by Astro:

• Custom Rehype plugin for transforming a ul > li > img into a CSS-powered Image Carousel (div > figure) is not applied for some reason withastro/astro#14931

Appreciating any help :)

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In general, I think a remark+rehype plugin for rendering a native markdown list of images as Photo Carousel or as a Photo Grid would be very useful for any WordPress -> Astro migrations. Of course, this can also be achieved as Astro component, MDX component or WebComponent, but I think that the simplest possible would be repurposing some native markdown syntax, e.g.

could render as photo grid (3 images in 3 columns):

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- ![Open in StackBlitz](https://developer.stackblitz.com/img/open_in_stackblitz.svg)
- ![Open with CodeSandbox](https://assets.codesandbox.io/github/button-edit-lime.svg)
- ![Open in GitHub Codespaces](https://github.com/codespaces/badge.svg)
---

could render as photo carousel (1 images visible, carousel scrollable with nav dots and nav buttons):

- ![Open in StackBlitz](https://developer.stackblitz.com/img/open_in_stackblitz.svg)
- ![Open with CodeSandbox](https://assets.codesandbox.io/github/button-edit-lime.svg)
- ![Open in GitHub Codespaces](https://github.com/codespaces/badge.svg)
- ![Open in StackBlitz](https://developer.stackblitz.com/img/open_in_stackblitz.svg)
- ![Open with CodeSandbox](https://assets.codesandbox.io/github/button-edit-lime.svg)
- ![Open in GitHub Codespaces](https://github.com/codespaces/badge.svg)

[Murderlon]

I strongly recommend to not extend markdown with your own custom syntax. If you must, use remark-directive, but you're really better off with MDX I think, especially inside Astro. You don't have to turn all your markdown into MDX either, it could just be the files that need a custom component.

[wooorm]

Crosslinking with remarkjs/remark-rehype#40